Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The study looked at 300 million tweets, measuring mood based on the occurrence of emotionally-charged words. The two most salient results:

The west coast is more cheerful than the east.

Work is depressing. People are happy in the morning and at night, but get more miserable as the day goes on. Thursdays are miserable, weekends are happy days.

Obviously, information about Twitter users probably isn't representative of the population as a whole, but the results are still interesting. This visualization shows Twitter activity over the course of a day, looped twice. Green indicates a positive mood, red a negative one. Areas grow as Twitter activity increases: